Schwerter zu Pflugscharen

Loitz is one of those former GDR towns that still suffer from the effects of German reunification. For a year "Infinite Place" looks behind the gray facade of the seemingly dying town and questions concepts of home and identity through the perspective of its old and new inhabitants. The town’s vacancy and people’s urge for self-realization create a fruitful look into the future.

Tells the story of punk in the GDR.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, citizens of East Germany had to get used to a new way of consuming, working, and living. New-found freedoms were a breath of fresh air for many but in the chaos leading up to reunification with West Germany, the experience was also disconcerting.

Located in former West Berlin, Tempelhof Airport reflects the dramatic history of the 20th century. Once a Nazi showpiece, it later became a symbol of freedom during the Berlin Airlift and the Cold War. In 1978, East German citizen Constanze Glien unexpectedly arrived here after her flight was hijacked, changing the course of her life.

Energie Cottbus, a small soccer club from the periphery of the republic, got promoted to the first division of the Bundesliga. Everyone was sure: They will get relegated immediately again! But everything turned out differently! The underdog club gave Cottbus — which was to many only known from scare stories about lack of prospects and unemployment – joy, hope, and pride. The film looks behind the scenes and shares the thrill of the people for the finale of the season.

Berlin, summer 1988: While Michael Jackson and Pink Floyd perform in the West, East Berliners can look forward to Bruce Springsteen, Depeche Mode and James Brown. The documentary reveals how the organizers enforced the concerts with the state authorities. On the anniversary of the fall of the Wall.

Dragan Wende has lived in Berlin since the '70s and has seen the city change through the years. His nephew comes to live with him as Dragan remembers the better days he lived as a Yugoslavian immigrant in a divided city.

Documents important parts of the East German rock music scene of the late 1980s, from well-established bands like Silly, to underground rock bands like Feeling B. This road movie features young people using music to express their take on life, opposition to their parents' generation and opinions on the social and political climate in East Germany. It includes clips from concerts and interviews with fans and members of various bands, such as Feeling B's Christian Lorenz and Paul Landers, now members of Rammstein.

2024 is likely to be a decisive year for Sahra Wagenknecht's political future. In the arena of power, she might assume a role that she is already very familiar with. In the early years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sahra Wagenknecht became the "most famous face" of the PDS, the successor party to the SED. Yet, even as the youngest member of the party's executive board, she was considered a "disruptive factor." She is unyielding and swims against the tide. Sahra Wagenknecht does not distance herself from Stalinism, nor from the Berlin Wall, and wishes for a reformed GDR.

Wall of Chaos

"Busch singt" consists of 6 films "About the first part of our century" and does not present Ernst Busch only as a singer but is a film with and about Busch as a chronicler and fighter for communist ideals of his time. Konrad Wolf died during the production, he directed part 3 "1935 oder Das Faß der Pandora" and part 5 "Ein Toter auf Urlaub".

Marcel Ophüls interviews various important Eastern European figures for their thoughts on the reunification of Germany and the fall of Communism.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of documents were hastily shredded by the dreaded GDR political police. 16,000 bags filled with six million pieces of paper were found. Thanks to the meticulous work of technology, the destinies of men and women who had been spied on and recorded without their knowledge could be reconstructed.

Thirty years after the Cold War ends, a former political prisoner of the East German secret police searches for the truth after learning his brother spied on him for the regime, and discovers the lasting effects of living in a surveillance state.

Born in Germany in 2002, Noa Blanche Beschorner evokes the memory of those who, a generation before her, lived through the separation of East and West Germany. Tapetenwechsel (Change of Scenery) is the story of youth seeking their identity when confronting their collective memory.

In February 1986 they received the call of a fatherland that no longer exists: four young GDR citizens on the verge of adulthood see themselves forced, like so many others in East and West Germany, to do their one and a half years of military service. What is special: Their service area is the border system, an anti-imperialist protective wall according to their superiors, death strips and prison bars for a population incapacitated in naked reality. Now, seventeen years later, there is a reunion with the comrades and the old post. This feature film, which was the first in reunified Germany to deal with the inner workings of the GDR border troops, tells of life on the fence, the associated contradictions and some hot phases in the Cold War.

Portraits six lesbian protagonists from rural and metropolitan parts of the formerly socialist Republic and has them tell their captivating and sometimes outrageous life stories.

Over the past hundred years, dramatic social upheavals have taken place in the name of Karl Marx's theories. In Western Europe, the student movement of 1968 and the Eurocommunists were inspired. And in recent times, the thinker has experienced a renaissance.

During the 16th Workers' Festival in Dresden in 1976, a student group of Chilean emigrants paints a mural symbolically depicting the activity of the Unidad Popular during Salvador Allende's reign. Festival guests comment on this work. Music by Chilean music group Jaspampa, formed in Leipzig in 1972.

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